Toolbox 2: Scientific

Many people over many years have filed millions of patents and you
might wonder whether some of them were re-inventing the wheel, or at
least had something in common with other patents. And you would be
right. In fact, many inventions unwittingly use the same principles.

Russian Genrich Altshuller (with a few colleagues) spent over 50 years poring
over more than 200,000 patents, extracting the common scientific principles that
they used and the way in which these were used to overcome various problems (or
‘contradictions’).

Scientific invention = parameters + principles + contradictions

TRIZ, the Russian acronym for ‘The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving’
contains quite a lot of detail. The following chapter extracts the key points
that will allow you to use these invent for yourself.